The MAGA Teens Knew They Would Get the Benefit of the Doubt [Update]

There have never been consequences before. Why would there be consequences now?

From the moment Nick Sandmann planted himself in front of Nathan Phillips, surrounded by dancing, whooping Covington Catholic students who found the elderly drummer's very existence to be at once amusing and worthy of their scorn, the only thing more inevitable than the initial outrage was the tsunami of counter-outrage directed at anyone who had the audacity to be mad that MAGA-hat-wearing teenagers would mock a Vietnam-era veteran. The campaign, which laundered Sandmann's statement through the usual sequence of right-wing media outlets, ended as all defenses of bigotry cloaked as even-handed appeals to civility do: with a pronouncement of judgment from the man who made his hat famous.

The speed with which Sandmann was able to marshal his posse of defenders, it seems, was not purely a product of the moral weight of his position. According to the Louisville Courier Journal, as video of the boys' leering faces raced across the Internet, Sandmann's family retained the services of RunSwitch PR, a Louisville-based media relations firm. (One of its founding partners is a longtime Republican operative, and currently serves as a conservative op-ed writer for the paper.) A spokesperson explained that the company is now "working with the family to ensure an accurate recounting of events."

None of the excuses made on behalf of these kids are capable of withstanding the slightest bit of intellectually-honest scrutiny. The presence of a few Black Israelites—a group that any resident of a major city learned long ago to ignore—has no bearing on whether it is acceptable for white kids to allegedly chant nationalist slogans at, of all people, a Native man. (Assertions to the contrary also betray a troubling tendency to conflate members of minority groups, as if all brown people are indistinguishable threats.) Nor do any of the purported "extended clips," disseminated by conservative journalists as if they were mini-Zapruder films, exonerate Sandmann and his friends. Some of them even serve as more damning indictments of the students' conduct.

Nevertheless, the Covington boys have already secured many of the hand-wringing statements of remorse they sought—especially from the pundit class, for whom enduring bad-faith accusations of "BIASED" and "FAKE NEWS" is more humiliating than kowtowing to the people who would make them. As usual, no one in America is more entitled to a presumption of innocence than white people.

Among the privileged, eliciting this sort of both-sides apologia is a tried-and-true method of evading responsibility for their actions. Also consider, though, the role of talking heads like Tucker Carlson, who reflexively crafted exculpatory narratives of their own and disseminated them to an online army of culture warriors. Consider the influence of Republican politicians, for whom defending anyone who shares their worldview—and obeying marching orders issued by the aforementioned talking heads—is now so important that their usual performative respect for troops disappeared altogether. Consider the invitations the kids have (maybe) already received to visit President Trump at the White House this week, and the TODAY Show interview that will air first thing Wednesday. Consider the fact that this family was able to hire a professional crisis management team to fight this battle, and that they even knew such a thing existed in the first place.

This centuries-old infrastructure of retrospective absolution does not manifest itself only when a powerful person needs it. Rather, the mere knowledge of its existence underlies how powerful people comport themselves every day. It is what enables them to stand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and harass a man like Nathan Phillips, wholly unconcerned about potential consequences, knowing that they'll get as many opportunities to explain themselves as they need.

Update: Since publishing this article, a startling number of readers have contacted us to point out that although Phillips served in the military from 1972 through 1976—a period that overlapped with the Vietnam War—he was not deployed to Vietnam during his tenure. (The Washington Post has since corrected its original description of Phillips, and in his interview with CNN, he referred to himself as a "Vietnam-times" veteran.) The text has been updated to reflect that the MAGA teens were merely mocking an elderly U.S. Marines veteran, not an elderly U.S. Marines veteran who also served in the Vietnam War.

In addition, others have taken issue with the characterization of the MAGA teens as directing "nationalist slogans" at Phillips, claiming that no conclusive video evidence has emerged of the MAGA teens chanting "build the wall," as Phillips stated in interviews immediately after the confrontation; nearby March for Life participants, not the MAGA teens, may have been responsible for these alleged taunts. The text has been updated to reflect that "chanting nationalist slogans" may not have been one of the several specific methods employed by the MAGA teens to mock an elderly U.S. Marines veteran.